


a thousand miles and poles apart

by paperclipbitch



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Community: shipswap, F/F, Getting Together, Pre-Femslash, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-18
Updated: 2015-04-18
Packaged: 2018-03-24 16:00:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3774754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pepper laughs, and says that she was just going to charge lunch to Stark Industries; they exchange rueful smiles, the women with the credit cards to the world in their handbags.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a thousand miles and poles apart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PhoenixFalls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhoenixFalls/gifts).



> [Title is from _Skyfall_ by Adele; sorry, I couldn't resist, and it kind of seems to fit?] I wanted to write this fic the MOMENT I saw the Eve/Pepper option on my assignment form, because WOW, how perfect! I hope this works okay; it should tie in with both canons, though I have played around a little with the timelines relative to each other, because I _can_. I'm sorry there isn't more, like, making out in this though :( Might need a sequel sometime.

There are traitors and double agents and defectors in all organisations across the world, or else there wouldn’t be much point in espionage, after all.

None of them are like Natalia Romanova, though; at least, not according to the files.

The woman is a spy and an assassin and very possibly a myth created to trip over all agents during their attempts to clamber up the ladder. A little like agent 007 has become, actually, only with a brainwashed past in Russia and enemies who still refer to her as the _Black Widow_ : an asset America can barely believe they acquired and are terrified of losing.

Perhaps she’s not actually any of those things, and it’s just that Eve has always had a thing for redheads.

Eve hasn’t had her undercover training yet, isn’t sure whether she wants to spend her life slipping in and out of different skins. But she has steady hands and she’s a good shot and she can keep a clear head even when her heart is trying to crawl out of her chest, and maybe she’ll never become a legend for new recruits to wonder over, like Bond or Romanova, but maybe she _will_. She has time yet.

+

Tony Stark liaises with Q Branch on a regular basis; he claims it’s part of a deal between the US and UK governments, but the newspapers and gossip magazines fill with his London exploits while he’s there and his intentions are suspect at best.

Most of MI6 seem unsure what to make of Stark: he’s a damn good engineer, has had a hand in most of the weapons and radio equipment any of them have ever used, but the man has a sense of humour verging on the offensive, and a list of conquests that rivals the ones they’re not supposed to have read in Bond’s files, but of course have.

Eve doesn’t spend all that much time at MI6; Stark is mainly M’s problem, which makes him mostly Tanner’s problem, but she’s run into him a few times because it is somehow impossible _not_ to. And where Stark goes, he is mostly tailed by Miss Pepper Potts, a tall, willowy PA with a permanently calm expression and eyes like an au pair who hasn’t slept in weeks. She wears expensive stilettos that have to be hurting her feet and about two-thirds of the words that come out of her mouth are: _no, Tony_.

Potts is beautiful in her own way, though Eve can’t help but pity her: a life spent picking up Stark’s pieces must be _exhausting_ , and she honestly can’t think of anything worse than paperwork day in, day out. Not when she has the option of fieldwork, opening out in front of her like a map, as far as the eye can see.

+

Tanner wants Eve to take some time to herself; he hasn’t forced her to yet, but it can only be a matter of time. Eve’s killed a double-oh agent and more than that, Eve has killed _James Bond_ , and she can’t believe her career isn’t in pieces, even if the rest of her seems to be. She was so confident, so _sure_ , and then she pulled the trigger and the world wasn’t the same after it. The world didn’t know how to be.

Her hands shook unbearably the last time she tried to go to the firing range. Unreliable, scared, unsure. Even if she’s got a career to salvage after this, she may still succeed in wrecking everything after all. 

The fall from the train took so long, and she kept thinking Bond would resurface from the water below, but he never did.

She’s sleeping poorly; even M called her into her office to say that blame could be assigned but wouldn’t be, but Eve still couldn’t get the pieces to fit back together that were seamless before.

Their new Q has some kind of fascination with Tony Stark, and even though his hobby these days seems to be skirting the laws of most countries in the world while dressed in a flying robot suit that fires rockets, the man himself has still made the time to drop in. He drinks all their coffee and helps blow up a project that Q branch have apparently been working on for half a decade, and Pepper Potts appears from nowhere and insists on taking Eve for lunch.

They go for sushi that’s so expensive the menu makes Eve wince internally – never externally; her poker face has taken too long to learn to abandon her now, even if everything else seems to – and she offers to charge it to the UK government. Pepper laughs, and says that she was just going to charge it to Stark Industries; they exchange rueful smiles, the women with the credit cards to the world in their handbags.

“How are you coping?” Pepper asks in the end, soft but straight to the point, reaching for more Sake and pinning Eve with a look. It’s harder than Eve was expecting, like nails dug into her arm.

What happened to Bond is classified; but then maybe there’s no such thing as classified where Tony Stark is concerned, if his computer skills are to be believed, and Eve suspects that what Stark knows, Pepper knows.

Eve says nothing, but enough of it flits across her face that it probably speaks volumes anyway.

“Yeah,” Pepper says. “The time Tony went missing for months in a warzone, assumed dead, was fun for me too.”

Eve had been in Kabul for two of those months, where the news was still pretty big, but she had other things on her mind. She didn’t think of Pepper at all, and the fact that she didn’t makes her internally wince a little.

“At least it wasn’t your fault,” Eve says, which isn’t much, but is probably too much anyway.

Pepper shrugs, looking down at her hokkigai. Her nails are immaculately manicured, smooth, unbroken, and Eve looks at her own ones, bitten to the quick, flaking with hangnails.

“I let Tony get away with so much bullshit that after a week I was convinced it _was_ my fault,” Pepper says at last, simple, the words light but the tone behind them brittle.

Eve isn’t sure what to say to that, doesn’t fight for words. She was taught, once, how to have a response for any situation, but this isn’t one of those. At least, she doesn’t _think_ it’s one of those.

“Did Tanner put you up to this?” she asks at last, shifting in her seat.

“No,” Pepper says, and Eve looks at her and the curl at the edge of Pepper’s mouth and thinks: _oh_.

+

She receives shoes for her first day as M’s aide; they’re glossy and beautiful and at least two inches higher than Eve has ever worn for herself, or even when an assignment has required a party dress and a pair of Manolos that are always claimed back afterwards.

_Tony wanted to modify these, is written neatly on a note inside, but I told him Q should do it; I suspect he’s got an email by now with plans for inserting garrotte wire into parts of these. I’m sure you can figure out pressure points for stabbing the heel through someone’s hand by yourself, though._

_Good luck!_

_P x_

The shoes are her size, which Eve isn’t sure is information that is readily available, but she’s rapidly learning – partially from Pepper – that if you’re in administration then there’s very little you can’t find out. It turns out that being in charge of organising the files is the way to any information you want, no matter how classified; the last time she visited the MI6 archives, she was struck by the glints in the eyes of every last one of the staff down there.

(Last month, just before the mess with Skyfall that no one wants to talk about anymore, Agents Romanova and Barton got brought in, sharing bloody noses and wry smirks. While they waited for extraction and medical attention, Romanova said little, and Barton said a lot, though not about anything in particular. When Eve looked them up later, she discovered that neither of them _technically_ work for the United States government, at least not in so many words. She bumped up against firewalls that even Q couldn’t pull down for her, but they did manage to eke out the name Peggy Carter, and, well, everyone who’s anyone knows what _that_ means.)

The next time he’s brought in for a bollocking from M, Bond looks at Eve with something almost fond, almost pitying in his expression. He doesn’t understand, in the same way that Eve didn’t understand: there’s more to life than just dashing yourself against walls until someone lets you die. There are ways of finding things out that don’t involve blood and kidnapping and running until your knees give out.

“Moneypenny,” Bond says, and Eve curls her toes in Pepper’s shoes and smiles and smiles and smiles.

+

“I see you left Stark at home,” Eve says, when Pepper walks in at what is tentatively the end of her working day; M’s gone home to get some rest, anyway, though nothing ever really ends at this level of MI6.

“I am the CEO of Stark Industries,” Pepper says cheerfully, sitting down in one of the chairs designed to keep visitors as on edge as possible before seeing M. “I don’t need Tony to get me in wherever I want.”

Her shoes are ostentatiously shiny today, and high, and the heels somehow look even more dangerous than usual. Eve narrows her eyes.

“Did you let Q get his hands on them?” she asks.

Pepper’s lips curl. “I might have.”

“And here I was, thinking you flew all the way here to see me,” Eve says. They’re tentative, about whatever this is, whatever this isn’t. It’s _something_ , but that’s about as far as any kind of definition gets.

“Perhaps I also wanted to see a potential future M,” Pepper says, and Eve jumps as though gunshot, looks at the office door even though she knows M is gone, she organised his car herself.

“What-?” she asks.

“Felix says the CIA speak very highly of you,” Pepper says neutrally, though her eyes are bright and wicked.

“I could ask why you have a friend in the CIA to gossip about me with,” Eve tells her, filing the information away to examine later, when it doesn’t make her head hurt, her hands tremble.

“Please.” Pepper rolls her eyes. “I was Tony Stark’s PA for a _long_ time, I’ve got contacts in most security organisations on the planet.”

“Who’s your contact in MI6?” Eve asks without thinking, and then ducks her head as Pepper laughs at her, leans across the desk.

“It’s not Q,” Pepper says quietly, “because I don’t think he could pull a string anywhere without accidentally exploding something on the other end.” She leans back and smirks. “Anyway, did you eat yet? I know everywhere in London that can get us a table at the last possible minute, even if the kitchen is about to close.”

“Well,” Eve says, standing up to slide into her coat, “so do I.”

Kissing Pepper is still new enough that it’s like a sting or a shock; Eve’s fieldwork held the option of seduction, if it was necessary, but there was never the desire behind it, the thing that makes this shudder and spark. Pepper’s eyes are bright with jetlag and she’s taller than Eve, just, and her hair is soft under Eve’s fingers. The same, and yet not the same.

“Do you want to call or shall I?” Pepper asks, lipstick a little smudged with Eve’s; complimenting colours, as it turns out.

“Stark Industries this time, MI6 next time?” Eve suggests, letting Pepper link their fingers together; it’s late enough that there’s no one to see, and while she’s always been discreet because this place is a hotbed of gossip, she’s never been _secretive_. 

“Sounds good,” Pepper says, pulling Eve after her as she whips out her phone with her free hand.

Eve laughs, and follows, and reflects that she was wrong for so long over the difference between those who were blood in the water, and those who were sharks.


End file.
